Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Two courses suggest themselves, one based on gratitude for reviving me, the other based on reality. I know you for what you are. Yes, know you—and that is unfortunate. It is hard to feel merciful.

  ‘To begin with,’ he went on, ‘let us suppose you surrender the secret of the locator. Naturally, now that a system exists, we shall never again be caught as we were—’

  Enash had been intent, his mind so alive with the potentialities of the disaster that was here that it seemed impossible he could think of anything else. And yet, now a part of his attention was stirred.

  ‘What did happen?’

  The man changed color. The emotions of that far day thickened his voice. ‘A nucleonic storm. It swept in from outer space. It brushed this edge of our galaxy. It was about ninety light-years in diameter, beyond the farthest limits of our power. There was no escape from it. We had dispensed with spaceships, and had no time to construct any. Castor, the only star with planets ever discovered by us, was also in the path of the storm.’

  He stopped. ‘The secret?’ he said.

  Around Enash, the councillors were breathing easier. The fear of race destruction that had come to them was lifting. Enash saw with pride that the first shock was over, and they were not even afraid for themselves.

  ‘Ah,’ said Yoal softly, ‘you don’t know the secret. In spite of all your development, we alone can conquer the galaxy.’

  He looked at the others smiling confidently. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘our pride in a great Ganae achievement is justified. I suggest we return to our ship. We have no further business on this planet.’

  There was a confused moment while their bubbles formed, when Enash wondered if the two-legged one would try to stop their departure. But the man, when he looked back, was walking in a leisurely fashion along a street.

  That was the memory Enash carried with him, as the ship began to move. That and the fact that the three atomic bombs they dropped, one after the other, failed to explode.

  ==========

  ‘We will not,’ said Captain Gorsid, ‘give up a planet as easily as that. I propose another interview with the creature.’

  They were floating down again into the city, Enash and Yoal and Veed and the commander. Captain Gorsid’s voice tuned in once more:

  ‘… As I visualize it’—through mist Enash could see the transparent glint of the other three bubbles around him—‘we jumped to conclusions about this creature, not justified by the evidence. For instance, when he awakened, he vanished. Why? Because he was afraid, of course. He wanted to size up the situation. He didn’t believe he was omnipotent.’

  It was sound logic. Enash found himself taking heart from it. Suddenly, he was astonished that he had become panicky so easily. He began to see the danger in a new light. One man, only one man, alive on a new planet. If they were determined enough, colonists could be moved in as if he did not exist. It had been done before, he recalled. On several planets, small groups of the original populations had survived the destroying radiation, and taken refuge in remote areas. In almost every case, the new colonists gradually hunted them down. In two instances, however, that Enash remembered native races were still holding small sections of their planets. In each case, it had been found impractical to destroy them because it would have endangered the Ganae on the planet. So the survivors were tolerated.

  One man would not take up very much room.

  When they found him, he was busily sweeping out the lower floor of a small bungalow. He put the broom aside, and stepped onto the terrace outside. He had put on sandals, and he wore a loose-fitting robe made of very shiny material. He eyed them indolently but he said nothing.

  It was Captain Gorsid who made the proposition. Enash had to admire the story he told into the language machine. The commander was very frank. That approach had been decided on. He pointed out that the Ganae could not be expected to revive the dead of this planet. Such altruism would be unnatural considering that the ever-growing Ganae hordes had a continual need for new worlds. Each vast new population increment was a problem that could be solved by one method only. In this instance, the colonists would gladly respect the rights of the sole survivor of the—

  It was at that point that the man interrupted. ‘But what is the purpose of this endless expansion?’ He seemed genuinely curious. ‘What will happen when you finally occupy every planet in this galaxy?’

  Captain Gorsid’s puzzled eyes met Yoal’s, then flashed to Veed, then Enash. Enash shrugged his torso negatively, and felt pity for the creature. The man didn’t understand, possibly never could understand. It was the old story of two different viewpoints, the virile and the decadent, the race that aspired to the stars and the race that declined the call of destiny.

  ‘Why not,’ urged the man, ‘control the breeding chambers?’

  ‘And have the government overthrown!’ said Yoal.

  He spoke tolerantly, and Enash saw that the others were smiling at the man’s naivety. He felt the intellectual gulf between them widening. The man had no comprehension of the natural life forces that were at work. He said now:

  ‘Well, if you don’t control them, we will control them for you.’

  There was silence.

  They began to stiffen, Enash felt it in himself, saw the signs of it in the others. His gaze flicked from face to face, then back to the creature in the doorway. Not for the first time Enash had the thought that their enemy seemed helpless.

  ‘Why,’ he almost decided, ‘I could put my suckers around him and crush him.’

  He wondered if mental control of nucleonic nuclear and gravitonic energies included the ability to defend oneself from a macrocosmic attack. He had an idea it did. The exhibition of power two hours before might have had limitations, but, if so, it was not apparent.

  Strength or weakness could make no difference. The threat of threats had been made: ‘If you don’t control—we will.’

  The words echoed in Enash’s brain, and, as the meaning penetrated deeper, his aloofness faded. He had always regarded himself as a spectator. Even when, earlier, he had argued against the revival, he had been aware of a detached part of himself watching the scene rather than being a part of it. He saw with a sharp clarity that that was why he had finally yielded to the conviction of the others.

  Going back beyond that to remoter days, he saw that he had never quite considered himself a participant in the seizure of the planets of other races. He was the one who looked on, and thought of reality, and speculated on a life that seemed to have no meaning.

  It was meaningless no longer. He was caught by a tide of irresistible emotion, and swept along. He felt himself sinking, merging with the Ganae mass being. All the strength and all the will of the race surged up in his veins.

  He snarled: ‘Creature, if you have any hopes of reviving your dead race, abandon them now.’

  The man looked at him, but said nothing. Enash rushed on:

  ‘If you could destroy us, you would have done so already. But the truth is that you operate within limitations. Our ship is so built that no conceivable chain reaction could be started in it. For every plate of potential unstable material in it there is a counteracting plate, which prevents the development of a critical pile. You might be able to set off explosions in our engines, but they, too, would be limited, and would merely Start the process for which they are intended—confined in their proper space.’

  He was aware of Yoal touching his arm. ‘Careful,’ warned the historian. ‘Do not in your just anger give away vital information.’

  Enash shook off the restraining sucker. ‘Let us not be unrealistic,’ he said harshly. ‘This thing has divined most of our racial secrets, apparently merely by looking at our bodies. We would be acting childishly if we assumed that he has not already realized the possibility of the situation.’

  ‘Enash !’ Captain Gorsid’s voice was imperative.

  As swiftly as it had come Enash’s rage subsided. He stepped back.

  ‘Yes,
commander.”

  ‘I think I know what you intended to say,’ said Captain Gorsid. ‘I assure you I am in full accord, but I believe also that I, as the top Ganae official, should deliver the ultimatum.’

  He turned. His horny body towered above the man.

  ‘You have made the unforgivable threat. You have told us, in effect, that you will attempt to restrict the vaulting Ganae spirit—’

  ‘Not the spirit,’ said the man. He laughed softly. ‘No, not the spirit.’

  The commander ignored the interruption. ‘Accordingly, we have no alternative. We are assuming that, given time to locate the materials and develop’ the tools, you might be able to build a reconstructor.

  ‘In our opinion it will be at least two years before you can complete it, even if you know how. It is ah immensely intricate machine not easily assembled by the lone survivor of a race that gave up its machines millennia before disaster struck.

  ‘You did not have time to build a spaceship.

  ‘We won’t give you time to build a reconstructor.

  ‘Within a few minutes our ship will start dropping bombs. It is possible you will be able to prevent explosions in your vicinity. We will start, accordingly, on the other side of the planet. If you stop us there, then we will assume we need help.

  ‘In six months of traveling at top acceleration, we can reach a point where the nearest Ganae planet would hear our messages. They will send a fleet so vast that all your powers of resistance will be overcome. By dropping a hundred or a thousand bombs every minute we will succeed in devastating every city, so that not a grain of dust will remain of the skeletons of your people.

  ‘That is our plan.’

  ‘So it shall be.’

  ‘Now, do your worst to us who are at your mercy.’

  The man shook his head. ‘I shall do nothing—now!’ he said. He paused, then thoughtfully, ‘Your reasoning is fairly accurate. Fairly. Naturally, I am not all powerful, but it seems to me you have forgotten one little point.

  ‘I won’t tell you what it is.

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘good day to you. Get back to your ship, and be on your way. I have much to do.’

  Enash had been standing quietly, aware of the fury building up in him again. Now, with a hiss, he sprang forward, suckers outstretched. They were almost touching the smooth flesh—when something snatched at him.

  He was back on the ship.

  He had no memory of movement, no sense of being dazed or harmed. He was aware of Veed and Yoal and Captain Gorsid standing near him as astonished as he himself. Enash remained very still, thinking of what the man had said:

  ‘… Forgotten one little point,’ Forgotten? That meant they knew. What could it be? He was still pondering about it when Yoal said:

  ‘We can be reasonably certain our bombs alone will not work.’

  They didn’t.

  ==========

  Forty light-years out from Earth, Enash was summoned to the council chambers. Yoal greeted him wanly:

  ‘The monster is aboard.’

  The thunder of that poured through Enash, and with it came a sudden comprehension. ‘That was what he meant we had forgotten,’ he said finally, aloud and wonderingly, ‘that he can travel through space at will within a limit—what was the figure he once used—of ninety light-years.’

  He sighed. He was not surprised that the Ganae, who had to use ships, would not have thought immediately of such a possibility. Slowly, he began to retreat from the reality. Now that the shock had come, he felt old and weary, a sense of his mind withdrawing again to its earlier state of aloofness.

  It required a few minutes to get the story. A physicist’s assistant, on his way to the storeroom, had caught a glimpse of a man in a lower corridor. In such a heavily manned ship, the wonder was that the intruder had escaped earlier observation. Enash had a thought.

  ‘But after all we are not going all the way to one of our planets. How does he expect to make use of us to locate it if we only use video—’ He stopped. That was it, of course. Directional video beams would have to be used, and the man would travel in the right direction the instant contact was made.

  Enash saw the decision in the eyes of his companions, the only possible decision under the circumstances. And yet—it seemed to him they were missing some vital point.

  He walked slowly to the great video plate at one end of the chamber. There was a picture on it, so vivid, so sharp, so majestic that the unaccustomed mind would have reeled as from a stunning blow. Even to him, who knew the scene, there came a constriction, a sense of unthinkable vastness. It was a video view of a section of the milky way. Four hundred million stars as seen through telescopes that could pick up the light of a red dwarf at thirty thousand light-years.

  The video plate was twenty-five yards in diameter—a scene that had no parallel elsewhere in the plenum. Other galaxies simply did not have that many stars.

  Only one in two hundred thousand of those glowing suns had planets.

  That was the colossal fact that compelled them now to an irrevocable act. Wearily, Enash looked around him.

  The monster had been very clever,’ he said quietly. ‘If we go ahead, he goes with us—obtains a reconstructor and returns by his method to his planet. If we use the directional beam, he flashes along it, obtains a reconstructor and again reaches his planet first. In either event, by the time our fleets arrived back there, he would have revived enough of his kind to thwart any attack we could mount.’

  He shook his torso. The picture was accurate, he felt sure, but it still seemed incomplete. He said slowly:

  ‘We have one advantage now. Whatever decision we make, there is no language machine to enable him to learn what it is. We can carry out our plans without his knowing what they will be. He knows that neither he nor we can blow up the ship. That leaves us one real alternative.’

  It was Captain Gorsid who broke the silence that followed. ‘Well, gentlemen, I see we know our minds. We will set the engines, blow up the controls—and take him with us.’

  They looked at each other, race pride in their eyes. Enash touched suckers with each in turn.

  An hour later, when the heat was already considerable, Enash had the thought that sent him staggering to the communicator, to call Shuri, the astronomer.

  ‘Shuri,’ he yelled, ‘when the monster first awakened—remember Captain Gorsid had difficulty getting your subordinates to destroy the locators. We never thought to ask them what the delay was. Ask them… ask them—’

  There was a pause, then Shuri’s voice came weakly over the roar of static:

  ‘They… couldn’t… get… into… the… room. The door was locked.’

  Enash sagged to the floor. They had missed more than one point, he realized. The man had awakened, realized the situation; and, when he vanished, he had gone to the ship, and there discovered the secret of the locator and possibly the secret of the reconstructor—if he didn’t know it previously. By the time he reappeared, he already had from them what he wanted. All the rest must have been designed to lead them to this act of desperation.

  In a few moments, now, he would be leaving the ship secure in the knowledge that shortly no alien mind would know his planet existed. Knowing, too, that his race would live again, and this time never die.

  Enash staggered to his feet; clawed at the roaring communicator, and shouted his new understanding into it. There was no answer. It clattered with the static of uncontrollable and inconceivable energy.

  The heat was peeling his armored hide, as he struggled to the matter transmitter. It flashed at him with purple flame. Back to the communicator he ran shouting and screaming.

  He was still whimpering into it a few minutes later when the mighty ship plunged into the heart of a blue-white sun.

  * * *

  The aliens were ugly and inhuman. As for their loathsome sexist attitudes—give them an inch and they’d take a female—anywhere…

  THE MONSTERS

  by Robert
Sheckley

  ==========

  Cordovir and Hum stood on the rocky mountain-top, watching the new thing happen. Both felt rather good about it. It was undoubtedly the newest thing that had happened for some time.

  ‘By the way the sunlight glints from it,’ Hum said, ‘I’d say it is made of metal.’

  ‘I’ll accept that,’ Cordovir said, ‘but what holds it up in the air?’

  They both stared intently down to the valley where the new thing was happening. A pointed object was hovering over the ground. From one end of it poured a substance resembling fire.

  ‘It’s balancing on the fire,’ Hum said. ‘That should be apparent even to your old eyes.’

  Cordovir lifted himself higher on his thick tail, to get a better look. The object settled to the ground and the fire stopped.

  ‘Shall we go down and have a closer look?’ Hum asked.

  ‘All right. I think we have time—wait! What day is this?’

  Hum calculated silently, then said, ‘The fifth day of Luggat.’

  ‘Damn!’ Cordovir said. ‘I have to go home and kill my wife.’

  ‘It’s a few hours before sunset,’ Hum said. ‘I think you have time to do both.’

  Cordovir wasn’t sure. ‘I’d hate to be late.’

  ‘Well, then, you know how fast I am,’ Hum said. ‘If it gets late, I’ll hurry back and kill her myself. How about that?’

  ‘That’s very decent of you.’ Cordovir thanked the younger man and together they slithered down the steep mountainside.

  In front of the metal object both men halted and stood on their tails.

  ‘Rather bigger than I thought,’ Cordovir said, measuring the metal object with his eye. He estimated that it was slightly longer than their village, and almost half as wide. They crawled a circle around it, observing that the metal was tooled, presumably by human tentacles.

  In the distance the smaller sun had set.

  ‘I think we had better get back,’ Cordovir said, noting the cessation of light.